In 1847, a rather breathless British travel writer, a Protestant named Susan Minton Maury, published her Statesmen of America in 1846 and was sufficiently impressed (not to say awed) by New York City's bishop, John Hughes, to devote twenty-five pages of her book — more space, in fact, than she gave to Daniel Webster, Chief Justice Taney, William Seward, or Martin Van Buren — to someone she described as “the historical man of the day” and the most impressive cleric in America. With his name appearing regularly in national newspapers, Hughes was certainly the most talked-about clergyman in the country.

Lord & Taylor, Fifth Ave. 39th St., Social Service for Employees, Interior, Classroom. Source: Museum of the City of New York

By Sandra Roff“Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” are two recent PBS series that dramatize working in the new department stores established in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the Atlantic, department stores were similarly enjoying success with stores opening and expanding to meet the demands of consumers. However, it was not just the sale of material goods to consumers that took place in these stores, but also activities that seemed to benefit employees. Forward-thinking employers believed they had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of their employees, whether it was for medical care, recreation, or even schooling: a movement known as Industrial Paternalism.

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Jackie Dinas, a docent at the Merchant's House Museum, about the process of researching Irish immigration and interpreting the lives of Irish servants in New York.

The Anti-Slavery Almanac of 1839 describes the kidnapping of a free-born man.

By David Fiske

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave shocked audiences a few years ago — not just with its depiction of the cruelty often endured by slaves — but also because of its acknowledgement of a tragic historical reality: that in those days a free-born African American could be kidnapped and enslaved. Sadly, the story told by the film — ​of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and subsequent servitude — was not a story that was unique. Before the Civil War, kidnapping was conducted with a certain degree of regularity.

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissancebegan with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).​​Bullard argues that Wyman and other members of Brooklyn’s business elite, inspired by William Roscoe, the "Lorenzo de' Medici of Liverpool," exemplify the ways in which “Atlantic commercial networks [facilitated] collaborative patronage of culture, and civic pride [that] flowed together around the arts.” She suggests that noblesse oblige as much as competition with Manhattan motivated Brooklyn’s “haut-bourgeois families” to employ their private wealth to sustain the arts as Brooklyn emerged as the third-largest independent city in the United States. Rather than proposing the creation of public institutions, Brooklyn’s elite employed the Medici merchant patronage model to found the city’s first reading rooms and musical, artistic, and horticultural societies to “serve as uplifting examples to their grubby and untutored urban neighbors.” Unfortunately, the Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance; and early success could not withstand the changes and divisions that the Gilded Age engendered. As a result, Brooklyn’s rapid but short-lived cultural renaissance remained lost to history — until Bullard followed Luther Wyman’s trail from rural Massachusetts to Brooklyn.

The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of RevolutionBy Mike RapportBasic Books (May 2017)​416 pg.

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure. In particular, he is interested in how “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place, or the city itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.